Last month, Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte granted summary judgment to plaintiffs and vacated the Bureau of Land Management’s notice that it was postponing certain compliance dates contained in the Obama BLM rule governing methane emissions on federal lands. If you’re a DOJ lawyer, it’s pretty clear your case is a dog when the Court enters summary judgment against you before you’ve even answered the complaint.

The case is pretty simple and the outcome should not be a surprise. BLM based its postponement of the compliance deadlines on § 705 of the APA, which authorizes agencies to “postpone the effective date” of regulations “when justice so requires.” However, every court that has looked at the issue has concluded that the plain words of the APA apply only to the “effective date” of a regulation and not to any “compliance date” contained within the regulation.

It seems clearly right to me. For Chevron geeks out there, I’ll note that the Court stated that, because the APA is a procedural statute as to which BLM has no particular expertise, its interpretation of the APA is not entitled to Chevron deference – a conclusion which also seems right to me.

What particularly caught my eye about the decision was the Court’s discussion of the phrase, “when justice so requires.” In a belt and suspenders bit of analysis, the Court also made findings that justice did not require postponement. BLM’s argument was that justice required the postponement because otherwise the regulated community would have to incur compliance costs. However, as the Court noted, “the Bureau entirely failed to consider the benefits of the Rule, such as decreased resource waste, air pollution, and enhanced public revenues.” Indeed:

If the words “justice so requires” are to mean anything, they must satisfy the fundamental understanding of justice: that it requires an impartial look at the balance struck between the two sides of the scale, as the iconic statue of the blindfolded goddess of justice holding the scales aloft depicts. Merely to look at only one side of the scales, whether solely the costs or solely the benefits, flunks this basic requirement. As the Supreme Court squarely held, an agency cannot ignore “an important aspect of the problem.” Without considering both the costs and the benefits of postponement of the compliance dates, the Bureau’s decision failed to take this “important aspect” of the problem into account and was therefore arbitrary.

I think I detect a theme here. Some of you will remember that Foley Hoag filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, supporting the challenge to President Trump’s “2-for-1” Executive Order. We made pretty much the same arguments in that case that Magistrate Judge Laporte made here – minus the reference to the scales of justice.

Unless SCOTUS gets rid of all agency deference, the Trump Administration is going to get some deference as it tries to eliminate environmental regulations wherever it can find them. However, if it continues to do so while looking solely at the costs of the regulations to the business community, while ignoring the benefits of the regulations, it’s still going to have an uphill battle on its hands.

Last month, Mark Walker posted about Executive Order 13771. Mark’s post was generally favorable, noting that a number of other countries have implemented some version of what is known as a “regulatory budget.” This post provides something of a counterpoint to Mark’s.

Put simply, I think that the Order is indefensible. It’s not about regulatory reform. It’s a transparent attempt to halt environmental regulation in its tracks, without regard to the benefit those regulations provide.

This week, on behalf of our client, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Foley Hoag filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in the case challenging the EO. One paragraph from the brief pretty much summarizes the argument:

It is important to note, as Executive Order 13771 acknowledges, that agencies are already required, where not prohibited by law, to ensure that the benefits of regulations exceed their costs. Thus, the only impact of the Executive Order is to prohibit agencies from promulgating regulations whose benefits exceed their costs, unless they eliminate two other regulations whose benefits also exceed their costs. This is the definition of unreasoned decisionmaking. It is also a thumb in the eye of Congress, which enacted public health and environmental statutes in order to benefit the public.

It is a bitter irony that the government is defending the EO in part on the basis that it is just another in a long line of regulatory reform EOs, even though the EO is in fact a repudiation of those prior orders, not an extension of them. This order is not about cost-benefit analysis; it is about cost-only analysis. By definition this approach ignores the public benefits that the underlying statutes are intended to provide. Thus, the “savings clause” cannot save the EO, because there is nothing left to save.

For the first time, the Office of Management and Budget ("OMB") is soliciting public comment on the Social Cost of Carbon ("SCC"). The SCC is a series of published values that represent the monetary impacts of marginal reductions in carbon emissions reductions, which are to be used by federal agencies when conducting cost-benefit analysis for rulemaking activities.

First published in 2010, the SCC is prepared by an interagency working group and is based upon three different integrated assessment models that project the economic impacts of climate change. The 2010 document setting for the SCC called for periodic review and update of the SCC as the science and economic understanding of climate change improves over time. The SCC values were updated in November of 2013 and have been increased to reflect improvements in the underlying integrated assessment models, including incorporation of the projected costs of sea level rise. Although OMB guidance directs that regulatory cost-benefit analyses should normally focus upon domestic costs and benefits, the SCC is a measure of the global benefits that are projected to result from marginal reductions in GHG emissions. The interagency working group concluded that the use of a global measure for carbon was appropriate because greenhouse gas emissions create a global externality, and the United States cannot resolve the projected impacts of climate change acting alone.

OMB is seeking public comment on the technical support document that explains how the SCC is set and specifically requests comment on (i) the selection of the integrated assessment models, (ii) how the distribution of SCC estimates should be used in regulatory impact analyses, and (iii) the strengths and limitations of the overall approach. The SCC is likely to be increasingly important as EPA proceeds with rulemaking activities to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from various sources. In fact, EPA employs the SCC in the regulatory impact analysis for the currently-pending proposal for New Source Performance Standards for power plants. The public comment period on the SCC runs through January 27, 2014.

Sunday’s New York Times had an op-ed piece by Cass Sunstein, recently departed head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, advocating for sensible measures to address global climate change. Sunstein’s argument is that

"Economists of diverse viewpoints concur that if the international community entered into a sensible agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the economic benefits would greatly outweigh the costs."

I don’t disagree with anything he says; I only wonder whether anyone is paying attention. On one hand, while Sunstein notes that President Obama supports cost-benefit analysis, Democrats in Congress – and many environmentalists – have long been skeptical, treating environmental questions as moral issues that should not be subject to something as crass as cost-benefit analysis.

Republicans used to support cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, Sunstein opens the op-ed with a discussion of the Reagan administration’s support of the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals. However, for the past ten years or so, Republicans have abandoned cost-benefit analysis for something much simpler – cost analysis. Today, if regulations cost too much – whatever that means – then they are “job-killers” and thus bad, even if the benefits exceed costs, sometimes by several multiples.

Maybe four years at MIT brainwashed me into blind acceptance of quantitative analysis, but this stuff doesn’t seem that hard to me. It is profoundly depressing that a significant number of environmentalists look only to the benefits of environmental regulation, while a similar percentage of conservatives now only look at its costs.

American College of Environmental Lawyers, The ACOEL, is a professionalassociation of lawyers distinguished by experience and high standards in the practice of environmental law, ethics, and the development of environmental law.